although the red arrows can be changed to something more suitable, they are good enough for testing the gameplay on the beta site. if the gameplay is good enough, then u can complete the graphics to the necessary standard. do u have a complete xml file yet?

iancanton wrote:although the red arrows can be changed to something more suitable, they are good enough for testing the gameplay on the beta site. if the gameplay is good enough, then u can complete the graphics to the necessary standard. do u have a complete xml file yet?

ian.

I will be spending some time on the xml this weekend. I have all the territories defined, starting neutrals, auto-deploys, and all the 'borders' entered, as well as the bombardments from the camps. I have also plotted the starting positions of the camps on the small map, and started the B ring. I've been able to use the map inspect tool on it - so I'm not way off base Some of those upper terrs have a heck of a lot of places they could bombard... just need the patience to get the whole list down for each.

Update - got all the bombardments coded, and a really really rough first try of placing all the armies in the bubbles for the small map... obviously have a ways to go on that but at least you can see they all exist! And the map inspect shows all the connections for D01.

Update: Large map coordinates plotted, I think they're looking reasonably close. Those nice shadow effects from the walls do give me some headaches trying to figure out exactly where the center of some of the circles are At this point, as far as I know, all borders / bombardments / starting neutrals / auto deploys and decays are correctly assigned.

I will probably go through and do another pass on the small map coordinates again tomorrow. I think other than that, all I need is to verify that the way I have set up the starting positions is consistent with what jonofperu intends. Right now I have it set up with each of the starting camps being treated as it's own position, and max of 4 positions per player.

We've discussed this and it's tied into other topics, but here are the options that look most promising to me so far (using the letters from the previous post):

OPTION D8 starting positions consisting of 2 territs per player with one on a corner and no two positions bordering each other in more than one spot. (thanks Koontz)

OPTION E4 starting positions with one territ per side. Even on every side for 1-4 players. 5-8 players are randomly assigned starting positions. The number of different players/starting positions with 5-8 should provide sufficient balance. (Also shown in the update above.)

Just found this from earlier in the thread - is Option E still the plan? If so that's an easy change

Update: Feeling better about small map. Starting Positions for 2-4 players are coded as described by jonofperu.... I really think this might be play-test ready. Here is a link to download the latest version of the XML: https://1fichier.com/?l7t2uxu5hf

I have passively followed this map development, and I am happy to see the most recent progress done. I may help in development phase if you need a volunteer. I will look more careful throughout the thread posts in next days.

XML seems to be working as intended at this point! Get over to the beta site and try it out if you're interested My early reaction is that it's fun but holy cow there are a lot of bombards. Getting up the initial levels is pretty precarious since the camps can bomb up the first two levels.

In 5-8 player games, I see that a player's starting locations are all randomly distributed. However, it seems unbalanced to me for a player to be able to spawn with all three (in 5 player games) or all two (in 6-8 player games) of their camps on a single face of the ziggurat. (NB: 15866011) There's even a slight chance that such a player in a 5, 6, or 7 player game could spawn with only neutral camps on the same face, leaving them uniquely uncontested in their ability to conquer two levels of one face of the ziggurat, almost (or entirely!) unbombardable by enemy camps.

Is it possible to add starting location groupings to 5-8 player games as well, the same way that you did for 2-4 players, mandating that each player should have two starting locations on opposite faces (either one north & one south, or one east and one west)? Each player's third camp, if a 5-player game, could be distributed randomly.

This does have the downside of no longer mandating all players to have a spawn on all four faces of the ziggurat in 2-4 player games... I'm not sure if that's an acceptable tradeoff.

For example, there are three possible outcomes in a 1v1: for simplicity, assume the first player drops both positions on the same face-pairs (IE both N&S, or both E&W). Now, the second player can either (1/15 chance) spawn both in the same face-pairs as their opponent, which is balanced; or (6/15 chance) both on the other face-pairs from their opponent, which is balanced; or (8/15 chance) spawn 1 on and 1 off their opponent's face-pair, which is less balanced.